Those who have been longing for a serious-minded, deeply felt musical to
open on Broadway this season have finally gotten their wish with The Light
in the Piazza. This show at the Vivian Beaumont shines like a beacon amid
the dreck that's clogged the Great White Way's musical stages this season;
whatever else might be said about it, its heart - and, unlike most other
musicals this season, it does have one - is always in the right place.

It's certainly easy to laud the intentions of the show, which seeks to
return to the Broadway musical a level of feeling, sophistication, and even
art that today seldom seems to have a place alongside the likes of Spamalot
and Brooklyn. Its capacity to unlock and address truly human concerns
(particularly of the romantic variety) is a welcome antidote to the many
recent musicals that are content with stock, jokey situations and archetypal
or downright stereotypical characters, when real characters are employed at
all.

It's more difficult, however, to praise the show itself. Based on Elizabeth
Spencer's novella and with an often lush score by Adam Guettel and a
generally admirable book by Craig Lucas, the musical bursts with the
sunshine and unique personality of its Italian setting (primarily Florence,
but also briefly Rome). But it doesn't deliver successfully enough on its
implicit promise to identify and celebrate the transformative powers of
love.

That promise is made no less than twice over the course of the evening:
First, for the young woman Clara Johnson (Kelli O'Hara), who's visiting
Florence with her mother and falls in love with an Italian man named
Fabrizio Naccarelli (Matthew Morrison). And second, for Clara's mother
Margaret (Victoria Clark), who learns through her daughter's fraught but
ardent courtship that she can - and should - expect better than her loveless
marriage to Roy (Beau Gravitte), who's stayed behind in the United States.

But in neither case does the show fully realize its potential for unlocking
greater meaning behind these two visions of love. While Lucas has deftly
scripted a number of complex relationships - Clara and Fabrizio and Margaret
and Roy, yes, but also Margaret and Fabrizio's father (Mark Harelik) - he's
often reluctant to let them drive the story on their own. Instead, he
implements a number of coy dramatic techniques and superficial obfuscations
that would be more rightfully at home in any of this season's other
self-referential musicals.

This usually manifests itself in Margaret, who narrates the show and doles
out - at points too precisely measured to be effortlessly effective - baldly
ambiguous information about an emotional impediment that might hamper
Clara's future happiness. (The mystery is eventually revealed in full, at
an arbitrary point.) But near the beginning of the second act, a heated
Naccarelli family scene stops dead in its tracks so Fabrizio's mother (Patti
Cohenour) can muse comically about narrating the show in English, which she
doesn't speak. This is an unnecessary jest that calls unnecessary attention
to the show as a show, something director Bartlett Sher otherwise works
scrupulously hard to avoid.

The rest of his production happily finds moments of simple magic in ordinary
occurrences, usually in the Clara-Fabrizio storyline: They meet charmingly
when he catches her wind-blown hat; she wanders the streets searching for
him but becomes lost and terrified in a vividly musicalized scene of
harrowing power; later, her feelings for him explode once at his overbearing
sister-in-law Franca (Sister Uriarte Berry) and once when she believes she's
lost him for good, when she wanders about a stage that suddenly becomes as
vastly empty as she feels inside. (The appearing and disappearing of
Michael Yeargan's imposing stone palazzo sets is another of this
production's impressive feats of stage magic.)

If Clara isn't necessarily the role that will make O'Hara the top-rank
Broadway star she deserves to be, it will hopefully at least lead her to it:
She's the production's standout, looking more radiant and youthful than ever
(as decked out in Catherine Zuber's lovely period costumes) and sumptuously
singing Guettel's rangy, difficult music with unqualified ease.

Clark is glowingly maternal as Margaret, a caterpillar slowly becoming a
butterfly, though she tends to oversell the more protective aspects of the
character, and her Southern accent is not always consistent. Morrison gives
a beguiling, sexually charged performance, but is frequently overtaxed by
Guettel's compositions and can't give O'Hara the strong musical counterpart
she needs. The rest of the supporting cast, which includes Michael Berresse
as Fabrizio's debonair brother, is uniformly strong.

Still, it's impossible to shake the realization that the show, above all,
belongs to Guettel. The composer, as well known for his impressive
theatrical lineage (Richard Rodgers was his grandfather) as for his 1996
breakthrough effort Floyd Collins, has provided here music and lyrics nearly
operatic in scope. The score counts among its offerings elaborate
counterpoint ensembles (there's a full-out octet in the second act), searing
arias, and even gently pulsing Italian pop-art songs that pinpoint the place
as well as the period (1953).

His finest numbers here include that octet, Clara's street-wandering
"Hysteria" and her jealousy-driven "Tirade," and the first-act finale "Say
It Somehow," in which Clara and Fabrizio break down emotional and linguistic
barriers in a few minutes of passionate musical love-making. But much of
Guettel's other writing is more staid in nature, and demonstrates his
unwillingness to exploit the full possibilities of the musical storytelling
form. Franca's backhanded "The Joy You Feel," the plaintive title song sung
by Clara, and Margaret's "Dividing Day" about her failing marriage are at
best obligatory time-wasters that could play equally well in some other
show.

Better can be said of Margaret's soulful 11 o'clock number, "Fable," in
which she details what she's learned about the difference between idealized
and realistic notions of love, between how children perceive it and how
adults know it to be. Clark invests herself in it like she does no other
song in the show, and it results in an absorbing, involving finale. But she
can't transcend its simplistic sentiments, many of which have already been
addressed in subtler, more compelling ways elsewhere.

The number soars easily, but has difficulty landing. The same can be said
of most of The Light in the Piazza.